If at any time when you are using Microsoft Excel you wish to save your work and quit, a simple and effective way of doing this is to press the close or “X” button at the top right hand corner of the program screen. When this is pressed Excel will automatically ask whether or not you wish to save your progress – simply select “Yes” to save your work and close Excel

You can also save your work without shutting Excel entirely, which is useful for saving your work as you go along.  To do this, click the Microsoft Office Button at the top left of your screen and select the “Save” or Save As” option.

The “Save” option will save any updates you have made to the current workbook in the location where it is already saved. If you have not saved the workbook somewhere already, Excel will ask you to give it a name and ask you where you want to save it (e.g. on your Desktop, or in My Documents). After you’ve given your workbook a name and a location once, pressing the “Save” button again will simply save the changes to the same file. A quick way of doing this is to press “Ctrl” & “S” keys together.

If you chose to “Save As”, you will be able to save a copy of the file in a different location with a new name, without overwriting the original. Only use “Save As” if you want to save a copy of the file with another name (for instance if you want to make a backup of the file in its current state before you make changes to it). If you just need to save the changes to the same file, use “Save” to avoid ending up with multiple copies!

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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel Training on May 1st, 2009 | No Comments »

Two of the main reasons to use Microsoft Excel are its ability to format data and to calculate mathematical equations. We’ll start off by looking at some basic examples of this – but once you’ve got to grips Excel, you can use it to perform some quite powerful calculations that will save you a lot of time working out sums manually! All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Training Course in Brighton, Sussex.

Before we start, we first need to check that your Enter key is set to move one cell down when you press it. If this is not the case then you need to change your settings by clicking on the excel “options” button at the bottom of the Microsoft Office Button’s menu list:

Each cell in a spreadsheet can contain text, a number or a formula. A cell that contains a formula can be used to display the results of a calculation based on the numbers in other cells.

The benefit of this is that once you have entered a formula in to a cell, the results of the calculation will update automatically when you change the numbers in the cells the formula refers to. You don’t have to do a lot of manual calculations when your figures change.

This can sound complicated and daunting, so first lets take a look at the the basic calculations that are available:

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The basic mathematical formulae that you will need in a spreadsheet are as follows:

Important: When entering any formula in to a cell, you must always start with a “=” sign

For example, lets say that in cell A4 you wanted to show the result of the numbers in cells
A1 and A2 added together. You would need select cell A4, type in “=A1+A2″ and press enter.

The result will then display as follows:

Note: Cell A4 now displays the result of the calculation.

If you look in the formula bar when you have the cell selected,  it will display the formula.

Try changing the numbers in cells A1 and A2, and watch the result of the calculation on A4 change automatically.

This same method is used with each of the other four basic calculations.

Let’s change the formula in A4 to a multiplication instead of an addition. Select the cell, and click your cursor in to the formula bar above the spreadsheet where it currently says “A1+A2″. Replace this with “A1*A2″
and press enter. The result of the sum is now a multiplication.

The equation you choose can be as complicated as you want and can just contain numbers as well as call names: = 15+15. In the case of a more complicated equation excel will work out division and multiplication before and then move on to adding and subtracting. To prevent this you will need to tell it to do the adding or subtracting first. The way you do this is to put the bit you want done first in brackets, i.e. (1+2)/3< ><–>

All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Course in Brighton, Sussex. Once you have mastered these skills you will be ready to attend our Advanced Excel Course, and really advanced might want to try VBA for Excel.

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A number is never just a number! Numbers can represent currency, percentages, dates, times and a range of other things. We may also want to display a certain number of decimal points or other aspects of the way our numbers appear on a spreadsheet.

The “Number” section of the Excel ribbon provides a range of options which you can choose from in the drop down menu bar and even more if you select the “More Number Formats” button at the bottom.

The Number formatting section is located in the middle of the ribbon. Simply highlight the cell or cells containing the numbers you want to format, and then select the correct formatting option from the “Number” drop-down list.

Once you have mastered these skills you will be ready to attend our Advanced Excel Course, and really advanced might want to try VBA for Excel in Brighton, Sussex.

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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel Training on May 6th, 2009 | No Comments »

Most spreadheets have some sort of formatting applied to them to make them easier to read and understand. Often you will want to create a border around a group of cells to differentiate them from others, or to put them in to a table.

There are two main ways that you can create a border in Excel.

The first is to draw the border using your mouse. You can draw a border along any cells you wish either horizontally or vertically. To do this: select the “Border options” button from the ribbon; this is the small arrow to the right of the actual “Border” button. This will display a list of options – click on the “Draw Border Line” option in the lower section of the list under the heading “Drawing Borders.”

With this option selected, your mouse cursor will become a pencil. You can now create borders by pressing and holding the left mouse button from where you want to start and dragging it to where you want it to end. You can either create a straight line or drag around a group of cells to draw a box around them.

If you want to draw a grid within your box use the “Draw Border Grid” button beneath the “Draw Border Line” option you used before.

All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Training Course. Once you have mastered these skills you will be ready to attend our Advanced Excel Training Course, and really advanced might want to try VBA for Excel in Brighton, Sussex.

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As well as being able to draw borders by hand, Excel also provides some pre-set options that you can apply to groups of cells. This will be covered in our Microsoft Excel Course in Brighton, Sussex.

To do this, highlight the cells that you wish to affect and then, using the “Border Options” button in the Formatting section of the ribbon, select the border Style you want around them. The options are in the top section of the  drop down menu under “Borders” as shown below:

Tip: To save time, simply pressing the Border button will apply the border style you used last which will save you having to choose it from the drop-down menu each time.

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Customising Borders

In addition to the standard templates in Excel 2007, you can also customise your borders, adjusting their width, colour and line style. These options are contained in the Formatting section of the ribbon and the Border Options button. All of this is covered in our Beginners Excel Training Course in Brighton, Sussex.

You can also, as in Microsoft Word, change the font and style of the figures and words that you put into your cells, as well as being able to change their size and underline them. Simply highlight the cells you want to format and then select the appropriate border, font and text formatting options you require from the Formatting section.

Changing Cell Size

We’ve already explored how to wrap text to make it fit in to a small cell – however it is also possible to change the width and height of the cell columns and rows themselves.

To alter the row height, move your cursor over the column on the far left of your screen, to the left of A1, where the numbers of the rows are shown. Hover the mouse arrow over the division between two cells, i.e. the top of A2 and the bottom of A1, until it changes to an icon shaped like a cross with directional arrows at either end. Now all you need to do is click and hold the left mouse button and drag the up or down and the height of the cell row will change. The same method is used for changing the width of the cells, by clicking on the divisions between the columns at the top of the spreadsheet.

Once you have mastered these skills you will be ready to attend our Advanced Excel Training Course, and really advanced might want to try VBA for Excel.

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Excel 2007 can create a range of graphs and charts based on data in your spreadsheet, including line, column, area, line, pie, scatter, and bar charts.

Once created, Excel graphs will automatically update to represent any changes in data that you may make.

Before we start you’ll need a set of data so that you can give Excel something to make a graph out of.  Copy the data shown below, or use something similar that’s relevant to you.

Using this example, highlight cells A5 to D8, i.e. all the information in the table apart from the total sales and the title. After you have highlighted the cells, click on the insert tab at the top of the ribbon which will give you a range of graph and chart options – select “column chart”. You will now be presented with a list of column charts to choose from, select the “Clustered chart”; this is the first one in the list under the 2D section.

The following basic graph will appear containing the relevant information:

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Posted by Alistair Wylie in Excel Training on May 6th, 2009 | No Comments »